Marshall took one, it slipped through his fingers, he lost it to the floor. “Slips don’t count,” joked the man amiably. Marshall took another, and as though it were immeasurably heavy, seemed to collapse under its weight back into the chair.
The man poked a lighted match into his face. He chuckled. “The condemned man smoked a hearty cigarette.”
The man blew, his eyes went back to his documents again. “Now, you’re going to die. You know that, don’t you? Your number is up.”
Marshall was scarcely listening to the words any more. The smoke tickled his nostrils. That gave him a better idea than the one that had just been so catastrophically thwarted. He pretended to sneeze. Made the sound that goes with it, one of the easiest of all sounds to mimic. “Ha-chew!”
“Good health,” the man said inattentively, eyes on papers.
That’s one thing he won’t offer me, is his handkerchief.
He rose from his chair. “Just a minute. Get a handkerchief back here.” The man started to turn his head. “Don’t stop. I’m still listening.”
The man obediently, and incautiously, reversed his head. The papers were before him, on his lap, anyway.
Marshall was behind the chair now, dead center. The man’s head, over the top of it, was like an egg sitting in its cup, waiting to be cracked.
This is too easy, this is almost like something in a dream. I couldn’t keep my hands down now if I wanted to.
“Go ahead talking. I can hear you.”
His right hand went into his pocket, came out with the hammer head. His left into his rear pocket, came out with a handkerchief, the one he was supposed to have come back here to get. He wrapped the handkerchief deftly about the hammer head and its stalk, made it into sort of an impromptu blackjack.
“I’ll come to the point. I guess you know why I’m here.”
“I do. I know exactly why you’re here.”
His arm went up and back. His body arched. His heels cleared the floor.
In the middle of his next sentence, he’ll be dead or dying. He’ll never get to the end of it, be it long or short. This is the last sentence he’ll ever speak, coming now.
“I want to interest you in taking out life insurance. I represent the Mountain States Insurance Company, ‘Bloodhound Farrell’ they call me, the way I track ’em down. Oh, they can’t get away from me; I never lost a man ye— What was that? What happened?”
This time he did swing his head — and his shoulders — completely around in the chair. Marshall had lurched forward, down onto one knee and one extended hand, out past the chair, but a sideward direction from it.
“I tripped over my own feet,” he said in a choked voice.
His hand was holding a bulgy-looking handkerchief, but it had not come unwound. He stuffed that back into his pocket, right while he was still prone like that, then rose, dusted the knee of his trouser.
“Didn’t hurt yourself, did you?”
Marshall was out of breath and shaken, but there was a curious smile on his face — and in particular an expression in his eyes — that was almost one of dazed exaltation. “No, I feel all right,” he said. Then, as though he liked the sound of that to his own ears, liked the feel of it on his tongue, he repeated it twice more, each time with increased intensity. “I sure feel all right. Boy, do I feel all right!”
Farrell looked at him a little dubiously, as though finding his behavior a little eccentric and wondering whether he would make such a good risk after all.
Marshall had stepped out of the room without a word. He came back bringing a bottle and two thimble glasses, all hooked onto the fingers of one hand. He was sparing one leg just a trifle, as though it still hurt him from his recent fall or lurch.
“I want you to have a drink with me,” he said ebulliently. It was a command, not an invitation.
“I came here to talk business.”
“Just one,” Marshall said. “I have to have just one drink. There are times when it’s, when it’s a sacrilege not to. Can’t help it if you join me or not. Put those papers back in your pocket. My wife’s waiting for me at the movie, and I have to get over there to her right away. You can look me up at the office some day, any day, if you want to talk business with me. But I’m giving you fair warning ahead of time, I don’t think you’ll get anywhere.”
He filled the two small jiggers, handed one over.
“Good luck,” Farrell said, crestfallen at the unpropitious turn the interview seemed to have taken.
“I know a better toast than that,” Marshall said self-satisfiedly. “You won’t understand it, but join me in it anyway. To the last sentence he ever spoke.’ ”
7
He slipped into his seat during the duration of another subtitle. It was so appropriate, it was almost uncanny; it gave him a start as he first raised his eyes to it.
“NOW you see how little
YOU HAD TO FEAR.”
In the brighter pallor that flushed the theatre immediately after it, she turned and saw him sitting there beside her again, almost as though he’d never left her.
“Did I take long?” he asked.
“I was so taken up,” she admitted, “that I lost track of the time. You missed the best part of it. Oh, it was so exciting.”
It was exciting where I was, too, love, he confided to her ruefully, unheard. But it would have been considered too unbelievable to go on a movie screen.
“I think it’s going to have a happy ending, though,” she assured him.
It had a happy ending there where I was too. But when a movie ends, it ends for good. The other story, outside the theatre, that’s never through, there’s always more to follow. And you can’t get up and leave your seat, for you are the story, you take it with you if you do.
“Did you get your wallet?” she remembered to ask after a moment.
“Yes,” he said. But then he began to laugh. He felt his pocket. It was still empty. He’d left it back there after all, even the second time.
8
Marjorie’s mother died in September 1915, quite unexpectedly. On a Sunday, the 12th of the month. The notifying telegram arrived the next morning, Monday, after traveling the night. He was the one who took it in; she was busy preparing their breakfast.
There had been no warning. She had been all right up to within hours of her death. A letter written by her to Marjorie, in which she expressly stated she was enjoying the best of health, had reached them only two days before, Saturday.
He opened it on the spot, the telegram. The fear he had felt at sight of it and which caused him to do so without waiting to give it to her, had nothing to do with her, was a personal fear for and about himself alone. That fear that was always hovering, so ready to pounce. A telegram was not a casual thing in 1915. What might this one not contain; accusation, denunciation, warning of impending arrest?
It was with a sense of relief that he read the actuality of the message. It was good news by comparison, for it was not the bad news he had dreaded so.
Mother passed away one this morning cerebral hemorrhage. Delaying final arrangements pending your arrival.
“Was that our bell?” she said, peering briefly from the kitchen doorway. “Was it somebody for us?”
He had to tell her then.
He told her in the kitchen. Gently took the thing out of her hand that she was holding, first, and then swung over the kitchen chair toward her. “Sit down,” he said, and when she had, then he told her as best he could.